Despite What You May Have Heard, "Believe Women" Has Never Meant "Ignore Facts"

The backlash to the #MeToo movement is here. The groundswell of public transparency about sexual harassment in recent months has only been possible because of the public’s unprecedented willingness to hear out and support accusers rather than shame them. That support was so powerful that a number of formerly untouchable harassers were finally brought face-to-face with the consequences of their actions. But nothing gold can stay. This week, with a failed “sting” operation aimed at discrediting rape survivors, a survivor-shaming op-ed in the paper of record, and mass cultural hand-wringing around the issue of “false accusations,” rape culture is fighting back.

On Tuesday, the New York Times published an editorial titled: “The Limits of Believe All Women.” Its writer, Bari Weiss, argues that “‘[t]he huntresses’ war cry — ‘believe all women’…creates terrible new problems in addition to solving old ones.” Specifically, that the idea that we must “believe all women” is terrorizing men, who now have to fear that false accusations of sexual misconduct will derail their careers or lives: “In a climate in which sexual mores are transforming so rapidly, many men are asking: If I were wrongly accused, who would believe me?”

It’s more than a little bizarre to refer to sexual assault survivors as “huntresses” in the first place; to my knowledge, no-one has actually shot Harvey Weinstein and mounted his head on her wall. Women are coming forward in order to make their work spaces safer, not for kicks, and though the consequences for the accused men have been unpleasant, they’ve been non-violent and, from my vantage point, entirely deserved. The accusers, whose sexual harassment tended to be very violent indeed, cannot say the same.

Of course, if men are genuinely nervous about being called out for harassment due to “transforming sexual mores,” perhaps they will stop engaging in the behaviors that seem likely to offend their female colleagues. That would be good. In the meantime, the cultural shift Weiss envisions more or less boils down to men becoming a bit more considerate in how they treat women. It’s hardly the Bonerpocalypse.

But Weiss fears more than a sudden epidemic of male politeness. She argues that we’re setting ourselves up to believe false rape and sexual harassment allegations. For evidence of this, she points to… some easily, instantly debunked false allegations, including and notably the botched Project Veritas “sting” attempted at the Washington Post.

“Just yesterday TheWashington Post reported that a woman named Jaime Phillips approached the paper with a story about Roy Moore,” she writes. “She claimed that in 1992, when she was 15 , he impregnated her and that he drove her to Mississippi to have an abortion. Not a lick of her story is true.” What is true is that Moore’s bid for an Alabama Senate seat has been plagued by a wave of credible sexual assault allegations since November, when the Post printed the first four allegations against him—most notoriously, Leigh Corfman’s claim that Moore had trapped her in his car and forced her to touch his crotch when she was just 14. This has made the Post a target of hostility from Moore’s campaign, which alleged that “[the] Washington Post has already endorsed the Judge’s opponent, and for months, they have engaged in a systematic campaign to distort the truth about the Judge’s record and career.” Conservatives, always eager to bite down on a “fake news” hook, have often portrayed the Moore allegations as a story about liberal media bias. Not only is President Trump firmly in Moore’s corner (claiming that Moore “totally denies [molesting children]” and that “you have to listen to him, also”), conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza has said, “If Roy Moore wins it will be the most demoralizing blow for the media since Trump’s election.”

If Roy Moore wins it will be the most demoralizing blow for the media since @realDonaldTrump ‘s election—so let’s make it happen

But, in fact, the Post expose was an example of media working the way it’s supposed to. The accusations in the initial piece have been carefully backed up with witnesses and supporting evidence; the mothers of two accusers, Corfman and Wendy Miller, have testified that they saw Moore bothering their daughters. Miller’s high-school yearbook, from the year she turned 16, bears a flirty inscription from Moore. None of this relies on the accusers’ word alone; as CNN anchor Jake Tapper recently noted, “I don’t think a story with 30 sources and four women making the accusations on the record is gossip.” Which is exactly why, when Phillips approached the Post, they were able to catch her red-handed.

According to the Post's account, Phillips’ story raised suspicions due to “inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations.” They were also keyed in to something fishy about the story when “she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.” The Post elected not to publish her story, and kept track of her until they saw her walk into the offices of right-wing lie factory Project Veritas.

Project Veritas, led by James O’Keefe, are notorious malefactors; they produce misleading “sting” videos aimed to make progressive institutions (or those that they perceive to be progressive, but are in fact just media companies) look bad. They’ve hit Planned Parenthood and NPR. This time around, O’Keefe presumably intended to bolster the narrative that the Post was printing false accusations in a deliberate effort to ruin Moore’s career. It’s a vile ploy. But—and here’s the important part—it is also a ploy that didn’t work.

Contra Weiss, “believe women” does not actually come into conflict with fact-checking sources.

“[It’s] not hard to imagine how this episode might have played out if Ms. Phillips had announced her accusations on, say, Twitter,” Weiss claims. “Or even if she’d taken her story to a less fastidious news organization. In this climate, it would have caught on like wild fire.” Yet Weiss is stuck invoking an imaginary catastrophe, because the fact is, the Post never printed Phillips’ story. Their fact-checking process caught the inconsistencies in her claims, and those inconsistencies were investigated until her lie was exposed.

Contra Weiss, “believe women” does not actually come into conflict with fact-checking sources; there’s a difference between engaging with sexual assault claims in good faith and having the legal grounding to print those claims, and even passionately feminist reporters understand that journalism has to adhere to the second standard. The other accusers’ stories were not discredited by association, as O’Keefe evidently hoped; in fact, they actually look more credible, now that we know they passed through the same rigorous fact-checking process that Phillips’ failed.

Though “false rape accusations” make for a good bogeyman, they are both rare and, according to the best evidence we have, shockingly obvious. Quartz recently published a round-up of the available research on false rape allegations, finding in the most detailed study ever conducted, “out of 216 complaints that were classified as false, only 126 had even gotten to the stage where the accuser lodged a formal complaint. Only 39 complainants named a suspect. Only six cases led to an arrest, and only two led to charges being brought before they were ultimately deemed false.” And furthermore, the research finds that false accusers tend to fit a recognizable profile: “[Almost] invariably, adult false accusers who persist in pursuing charges have a previous history of bizarre fabrications or criminal fraud.” Finally, these accusers usually make claims of exceptionally violent sexual assault—if they want to frame somebody, there’s no point in framing them for a crime that might be dismissed as “minor.”

Unsurprisingly, the woman hired by Project Veritas fits exactly this profile; her false allegation comes from an organization with a history of “bizarre fabrication,” it had obvious inconsistencies, and its violence was exaggerated in comparison to the other accounts—where Leigh Corfman alleged that Moore had forced her to touch him over his underwear, Phillips claimed that Moore had raped her, gotten her pregnant, and forced an abortion on her. From the beginning, it raised red flags for reporters who’d heard more credible allegations.

Not only are feminists not abandoning the need to responsibly investigate assault and harassment claims, they’re turning the tenets of responsible investigation into hashtags.

Though Weiss waves her hands in the direction of kangaroo courts and character assassination campaigns, she’s unable to come up with any concrete example in which our current cultural support for survivors has led to an undeserved negative outcome for the accused man. Both of her other “false allegation” examples center on Senator Al Franken (D-MN), who has apologized for groping Leeann Tweeden, saying that although he recalls details of her account differently, “you have to respect women’s experience.” In one, a conservative radio host claimed Franken “stalked” her after he called her on the phone three times; this was widely decried as an opportunistic exaggeration. In another, the New York Post claimed to have unearthed photos of Franken “groping” Arianna Huffington; this was debunked by Huffington herself, who confirmed that the photos were staged, writing that “[Franken] was no more ‘groping’ me than I was ‘strangling’ him.”

Just got more photos from the same “scandalous” photo shoot. Here instead of Al Franken “groping” me, I'm “strangling” him. I hope the statute of limitations has expired! #lockmeuppic.twitter.com/6mjlYbhdvW

Defending the honor of Al Franken is a dubious quest to begin with. But even our current cultural emphasis on “believing women” has not translated as an increased willingness to believe overtly spurious claims about him. And in the second instance, “believing women” actually meant believing Huffington when she said she was not abused.“I believe that it’s condescending to think that women and their claims can’t stand up to interrogation and can’t handle skepticism,” Weiss writes. “I believe that facts serve feminists far better than faith.” That’s fair. But Weiss seems to have forgotten to include the part where she shows that supporting survivors is incompatible with a respect for facts.“Believe all women” has never been a slogan for anti-rape advocates. Human nature being what it is, false rape claims are always possible. The phrase is “believe women”—meaning, don’t assume women as a gender are especially deceptive or vindictive, and recognize that false allegations are less common than real ones. And, as a matter of fact, neither of those phrases is the actual rallying cry of the current moment. That slogan is #MeToo—which is, itself, a reference to a verification tactic. It’s “me, too” as in “he did it to me, too:” A powerful man’s abuse can be more credibly exposed when multiple victims correlate each others’ accounts. Not only are feminists not abandoning the need to responsibly investigate assault and harassment claims, they’re turning the tenets of responsible investigation into hashtags.

“False rape allegations” are nowhere near enough of a threat to justify derailing #MeToo and its quest to bring justice to survivors. False allegations exist—but they’re rare, they’re bizarre, and they’re easy to expose. Sexual violence, meanwhile, is neither rare nor strange. It happens every day, mostly to women. Those facts should bring some solace to any innocent man who is genuinely terrified of being falsely accused. But they also mean that when a normally trustworthy woman gives us an ordinary-sounding account of assault or harassment, she is probably not making it up. It means, in other words, that you should believe women—not because you have an obligation to ignore the facts, but because the facts say women aren’t lying.

Sady DoyleSady Doyle is the author of 'Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear ...

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